Swedish startup Epicenter chips employees

The Swedish startup hub Epicenter offers all its employees the option to implant a microchip the size of a grain of rice in the palm of their hand, allowing them to open doors, use printers, order juices, and use their palm as an identification magnetic card is used in companies. The insertion of the microchip via injection has become so popular among employees that every time someone new decides to get chipped, the employees organize a party.

– The biggest advantage of chipping is personal convenience. The chip replaces many things you usually have to carry wherever you go, such as credit cards, ID cards, and keys, says the founder and director of Epicenter, Patrick Mesterton.

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Chipping is not a new thing; cats and dogs have such microchips implanted daily. The novelty is that now humans have agreed to be chipped like their pets. Companies use such chips to track shipments more easily; however, this is the first time a company allows their broader application on employees.

Chipping people raises a whole set of privacy-related questions. Namely, although most of our smartphones have built-in technology that can track the movement or, for example, the consumer activities of the phone’s owner, the mobile phone can always be separated, but the chip remains implanted under the skin.

In this way, we voluntarily agree to give the employer insight into where we move, when we entered the company, when we left it, what we consumed, and what information we used.

– Installing something on your body is a big step, even for me. However, people install various devices in their bodies, such as pacemakers that monitor heart function, and that is a significantly more serious device than an ordinary chip that communicates with some other devices, says Mesterton.

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In the Epicenter hub, there are more than 100 companies and over 2000 workers, and 150 of them have decided to get chipped. Although the chips are biologically safe for use, the question arises as to how secure the data exchanged with other devices is from misuse, writes AP.

– The information you can get from chips implanted in the human body is fundamentally different from the data you can steal from someone’s mobile phone. From such chips, someone can find out what your health condition is, where you move, how much you work, how often you go to the toilet, warns microbiologist Ben Libberton from the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm.

However, chipped workers at Epicenter are not worried about this.

– I want to be part of the future, says 25-year-old Sandra Haglof, who works at Eventomatic, located in the Epicenter hub.